The recent availability of new web service tools such as SOAP, WSDL, XML-RPM etc. has enabled rapid development and roll-out of complicated web service functionality. Prior to the availability of such tools, large web service projects such as online backup, central queuing, online product pricing, image storage and retrieval and online searching took long amounts of time, large programming teams and substantial financial investments to develop. As a result of the simplified development enabled by the new tools, more web services are available to end users today.
End users benefit from the greater availability of these web services, as the services themselves provide useful functionality. However, although the available tools allow rapid development of the underlying functionality, they do not provide or automate development of an associated user interface. Therefore, although there is now a greater availability of web services, these services often lack a functional web based frontend. As the publishers of web based services have no tools for easily creating user interfaces, the publishers tend to focus on the web services themselves, and leave the frontend to other developers.
What is needed are methods, computer readable media and computer systems that provide a generic framework that greatly simplifies the task of creating a web based frontend for web services.